So, I've extended GridView to include an Advanced Search feature tailored to the needs of my organization.

• Filter - lets you show/hide columns in the table, and you can also reorder columns by dragging the little drag icon to the left of each item.
• Sort - Allows for the selection of multiple columns, specify Ascending or Descending.
• Search - Select your column and insert search parameters. Operators tailored to data type of selected column.

Version 1 works, albeit slowly. Basically, I had my hands in the inner workings of CGridView, where I snatch the results from the DataProvider and do the searching and sorting in PHP before rendering the table contents.

Now writing Version 2, where I aim to focus on clever CDbCriteria creation, allowing MySQL to do the heavy lifting so it will run quicker. The implementation is trivial when dealing with a single database table. The difficulty arises when I'm dealing with 2 or more tables... For example, if the user intends to search on a field that is a STAT relation, I need that relation to be present in my query.

Here's the question. How do I assure that Yii includes all with relations in my query so that I include comparisons? I've included all my relations with my criteria in the model's search function and I've tried CDbCriteria's together ...

public function search() {
    $criteria=new CDbCriteria;
    $criteria->compare('id', $this->id);
    $criteria->compare( ...
    ...
    $criteria->with = array('relation1','relation2','relation3');
    $criteria->together = true;

    return new CActiveDataProvider(
        get_class($this), array(
            'criteria'=>$criteria,
            'pagination' => array('pageSize' => 50)
));}

But I still get errors like this...

CDbCommand failed to execute the SQL statement: 
SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 't.relation3' in 'where clause'. 
The SQL statement executed was: 
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT `t`.`id`) FROM `table` `t` 
LEFT OUTER JOIN `relation_table` `relation0` ON (`t`.`id`=`relation0`.`id`) 
LEFT OUTER JOIN `relation_table` `relation1` ON (`t`.`id`=`relation1`.`id`) 
WHERE (`t`.`relation3` < 1234567890)

Where relation0 and relation1 are BELONGS_TO relations, but any STAT relations are missing. Furthermore, why is the query a SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT 't'.'id') ?